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Description
A map of the world in the year 2500 CE, showing submerged areas and with an addition to show the continent of Antartica in more detail. Circled on the map in yellow is the arcology of Miami, sitting on carefully reclaimed land and practically the only city to remain in the unpredictable and dangerous Caribbean Gulf. Besides borders of the various city-states and the remaining freshwater sources, you can see the markings made to indicate available large-scale (i.e. several times the size of a developed country's national grid) power sources in each region, as noted in the map key.

The nations of the 21st century no longer exist by the 26th - though a multitude claiming to be descended from them do. However, the biggest mark of the passage of time is the simple affect of climate change.

By the end of the 21st century, vast tracts of land above and below the equator were regularly being scorched with temperatures exceeding 60˚C, from the Great Plains and California in the US to the vast bulk of central China, while severe weather events like hypercanes meant the Caribbean, Central America, Southeast Asia and the Southeastern US - not to mention most of South America - were completely uninhabitable. The governments of these now uninhabitable disaster zones were busy building massive structures to keep their cities liveable and safe from the conditions but failing miserably. The melting of glaciers dried out Asia, forcing China into decline alongside an India beset by destructive monsoons and soaring temperatures, while opening up new farmland in Patagonia. Greenland's icy wastes became instead solid rock and slushy mud, perfect for Denmark to heavily invest in by fertilising soil and planting crops across the formerly barren island. Europe held out with desalination plants and the Arab nations turned up the air-conditioning, while Russia and Canada began huge farming industries as the permafrost disappeared.

Meanwhile Australia and New Zealand both experienced a population boom and rapid industrialisation as refugees from Asia and India overwhelmed them, while Chile, Argentina and South Africa became the go-to destination for impoverished refugees on their respective continents. At first, the approach of these nations was to simply “keep the migrants out,” as they had done for many years, but by the second decade of the 2200s, the millions in refugee camps became a wasted resource as politicians suddenly realised they could use these desperate people as a low-cost workforce to drive their economies while looking good at the same time - which they needed to do, as their trade with both the US and China had now risen exponentially as those countries dried up and looked elsewhere for food. Simply put, they needed more labourers to increase food production, and they got them. For example, South Africa’s economy was invigorated by the crowds fleeing uninhabitable Madagascar and South-East Africa, and New Zealand was quickly converted to a series of huge mega-cities with intensive farming collectives in between. Australia suffered the affects of increased desertification, resulting in the countries coastline becoming a series of super cities while Tasmania remained a green oasis of intensive farming.

Very quickly this model of openness to refugees was copied by the USA, but in reverse - as the 2200s wore on, the US was a barren desert and only mining remained plausible, and Mexico was already gone, absorbed into the US in the 2080s by popular referendum to stave off inevitable collapse. The USA used the situation in the South Pacific to justify the takeover of Canada in a passive-aggressive move, following the millions of ex-Americans who had already fled there. Canada was quickly absorbed into the US with a whole lot of papers being signed that basically established a government-in-exile of the United Sates alongside the Canadian Parliament, which would jointly control the country. The fact America brought its nukes and military gear over the border as well sparked an ugly backlash of violence, mostly ex-patriate American-Canadians shooting at freshly-arrived Americans. It all calmed down eventually, but the US and Canada broke up shortly afterwards as countless groups declared independence and it eventually became simply too much hassle to shoot everyone instead of simply letting them go after signing a favourable trade deal - thankfully nobody was crazy enough to nuke the only farming land left on the continent to get their way. By the 2300s, North America was basically a huge farming conglomerate in Northern Canada of independent farming cities that traded with each other.

Russia had been more canny, taking in Asian and European refugees without fuss and parcelling out newly productive land as it appeared to the highest bidder. Ultimately, though, the influx of so many different political and social groups was too much for the social order to take, and a bloody civil war broke out. By 2270 the country had fallen into the same state as North America.

China poured its wealth and technical knowledge into keeping vast regions viable for farming and living even as sea levels rose, but as the majority of the population left and local industry tanked it became too little, too late - the Communist Party was never overthrown but simply ignored in the end after a severe twenty-year drought from 2210-2230, when the military and the people both decided to stop taking orders and just leave for the north in The Great Migration. Those left behind became fairly radical but basically stayed maintaining the newly revitalised areas, until the melting of Antartica took the sea levels too high for their ever-larger dams and flooded most of their hard-earned farmlands in 2340. Now it’s a bunch of different rulers and local groups holding sway over the remaining habitable areas. Not that this is a mark of failure - the same fate befell any country unlucky enough to be within 100m of 20th-century sea levels and open to the sea during The Great Melt of Antartica.

Speaking of Antartica, this was the most changed - already in 2100 West Antartica had been ice-free, but this process really got going in the 2200s. The Rush For Antartica was the last great colonial push by all the old powers, along with the newly formed governments - the Chileans and Argentinians had already built impressive industries and cities in West Antartica, and every other country wanted a piece of the pie. Huge engineering projects altered freshly-emerged coastlines, created rivers and lakes and built huge walls to keep back rapidly-rising waters, and large parts of the coastline remains to this day a morass of unpredictable built-up land that may or may not flood or wash away at the next high tide. Of course, by the end of 2200, most of the nations funding this and sending people were gone, and those living there found out the hard way freshly melted soil thousands of years old and rock do not make for good farmland. So a multitude of high-tech, gasoline powered cities arose as they turned to mining and drilling for oil instead.

The planet’s oil reserves finally gave out in 2335, by which time Antartica was self-sufficient and the rest of the world able to get by on the now more-reliable solar power. The fortunes of the Arab nations were now gone, but they’d been adjusting already over the previous century and a half as oil supplies had inevitably shrunk, and survived both as several strong city-states - Qatar being the most secure and advanced - and as nomadic tribes. Geothermal and wind energy also became the focus of several locations, creating new nations in these areas of self-contained cities. This trend spread globally as war was now just too expensive a risk and pointless - after the breakup of China, Russia, the US and Europe, pretty much every man and his dog had taken at least one nuke home from the piles of military hardware left lying around. The few nations that started fights got pulverised within minutes.

By this point, however, nations were not really a concept anyone used or were even familiar with anymore. With either scorching heat or polar nights to contend with, cities had become self-sufficient and borders unmanned because only fools or desperate people would go outside without using the highways, planes and train lines between each community - and if they crossed a border, they were generally welcomed as a new worker to help keep things running rather than a nuisance.

The nation state, multinational states and federated states had existed as concrete concepts for only a few centuries when the last of them simply faded away, replaced by a return to city-states and communal farming communities the world over, with the occasional local confederation for controlling a body of water or other valued resource (such as the African Confederation that allows its member city-states to work together in keeping the massive solar panels spread over the desert operating for them all, thus ensuring redundancy for damages caused by destructive sandstorms). As a result, borders became increasingly fuzzy - essentially being the area where one cities patrol drones and militias could reach and be confident of backup in case of trouble. Frequent border disputes were the result, but as time wore on it simply became a case of keeping armed when patrolling the further reaches of the land the city claimed, and simply hoping to outgun whoever caught you in “their” corner of the endless desert. When everything on land is bone dry, the only border that anyone is going to want to take or invade on is the coast. In the far north and south the farming cities and communities were more structured but again, didn’t really have the ability to patrol every patch of land 24/7.

This of course removed a large obstacle to the groups of people who had returned to (or in the case of the Roma, continued) a nomadic lifestyle. Besides those who roam the farmlands and chillier parts of the far north and south, frequently being attacked on suspicion of stealing crops, there are large quantities of desert dwellers that live in the supposedly inhabitable deserts of sand and baked dirt, and have formed countless rich and skilled cultures. And of course there are large numbers of sea nomads - communities that roam the colossal oceans and live in perfect harmony with the sea that has swallowed up so much.

Meanwhile the new city-states, especially closer to the equator, became ever more solipsistic and out of touch with nature - or what was left of it. Doming cities over with reflective mirrors and/or solar panels became common in the 2300s and soon full-blown arcologies had developed. Space exploration had already been brought to a halt by mounting financial fallout from climate change and resulting civil unrest back in the 2200s, but exploration of Earth for fresh resources and trade opportunities hadn’t - but as the 2200s ended and many countries that had invested in Antartica found no return on their investments, or collapsed under the strain of trying to build a new civilisation from scratch at the bottom of the world, turned people off the idea of investment or expansion. Ruling the world wasn’t worth it when it was either flooded or 60˚ in the shade. Increasingly, rather than growing larger or increasing connections with others, city-states fragmented again and again as different groups with different ideas set up their own city-states within their parent one.

Culture and ideas as a result are very different. Whereas today we see nation-states and monarchies, and a conflict between atheism and religious orthodoxy, in the twenty-sixth century this has changed to city-states and nomadic communities, with a conflict between personal philosophies of the city-dwellers and the naturalist spiritism or superstitions of the nomadic peoples. Organised religion is gone, but atheism is not really the focus of any great sentiment - rather, the solipsistic nature of living in arcologies has merged with the results of 21st-century idealism - specifically, the belief in every individual having inalienable rights and freedom of choice. In the 2200s this mainly manifested as civil unrest as people fought for their rights to be respected in the new places they settled, but from the 2300s onwards, the protests and uprisings stopped being about rights and instead on how people felt things should be run for “maximum efficiency” or “maximum quality of life” and so forth. These philosophies tend to be what we today would consider political arguments, and indeed can be formed into political parties. Advances and skills in engineering and recycling are the main focus of everyone for a brighter future, rather than IT or space exploration, and tend to be the centrepieces of the more controversial philosophies - most debates and research tends to be on the power of engineering to make any place liveable for humanity and the philosophical implications of different engineering approaches, echoing similar debates over evolution today.

However with social media any opinion on anything could amass a following and, in enough numbers, this lead either to the overthrow of previous governmental systems or the setting up of a new arcology - increasingly the strategy for victorious movements became simply to evict the losing movement’s members from the city and let them find their own way. This wasn’t really a setback though - centuries of social media had conditioned people to be incredibly sensitive to even the hint of someone thinking they might be wrong, so having a chance to build their own city and own personal Internet clean of such “intolerance” was often a gift to these ones. And of course that cycle continued repeating. As a result, the World Wide Web no longer exists at all - it had already been broken up during the 2200s and the collapse of governments able to maintain oceanic cables, but the personal philosophy trend was the nail in the coffin, and isolationist tendencies are rife in the city-states.

Naturalist spiritism or superstitions, on the other hand, tend to be widely shared between various nomadic communities as they cross paths. Depending on nature means developing a healthy respect and reverence for it, and in place of religious belief a number of colourful superstitions and rituals have arisen - nothing like organised religion, more like the tradition of “touch wood” or crossing fingers for luck, but with more steps and a bit more inner belief these things really make a difference. Their sense of community is far more hospitable than the isolationist city-dwellers, but infrequent due to limited contact with each other as communities remain split up over vast distances into small groups, to ensure enough food can be found for all in the inhospitable landscapes they roam.

Miami, marked by the yellow circle, is in the middle of the inhospitable Caribbean Gulf, but got lucky over the centuries with skilled engineering projects making it capable of withstanding back-to-back hypercanes without issue, much like Washington Island further north. It recently evicted a faction of city engineers that promoted a belief in nomadic lifestyles - they have since constructed a floating city-ship and roam calmer waters further out in the Atlantic. The winning faction was led by dark horse Mal Jy, a dark-haired and quiet man of middle age who single-handedly disabled the cities power grid in the midst of the other faction’s coup attempt, simply to prove his point - that a centralised system of engineering was too risky. He thus ended the coup and replaced the previous government with himself in one fell swoop, and has since converted the cities infrastructure so that every dwelling is a self-contained arcology by itself. He is no dictator - in fact after replacing the previous government, he specifically organised free and open elections to legally obtain executive power, before evicting the engineering faction. He is, instead, someone who believes in gathering information and acting on it for the greater good, regardless of other’s personal feelings. Which is why he had this map made, the first truly global map of Earth to be produced in two centuries. It will be used to inform his next moves as he seeks to guarantee Miami’s future in a changed world.

And the big red X in the middle of the Atlantic? That's the aliens. Contrary to all expectations, aliens didn't come to conquer or befriend humanity - rather, one just dropped in on an impulse one day - literally. That's because the alien race - known in human language as The Divers - are a race of magnetic fields. Borne in the heart of a gas giant in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy, they exist as complex patterns of magnetic fields in the super-dense core of their world, and the magnetised metals that generate them. As a result they tend to be a fairly stable society, living practically indefinitely unless some catastrophe disrupts the magnetic fields making them up, and the community coming together to stir a section of their environment into a magnetic frenzy that will produce a new individual - generally with a personality already set for it according to community consensus. They need turbulent and hot conditions to drive their bizarre electromagnetic biology, and a result their spaceships are generally made of tungsten and pressurised to ridiculous levels. They tend to colonise gas giants, brown dwarfs and stars rather than rocky, cold worlds that hold no interest for them and that they often cannot even perceive, as their vision is pretty much limited to detecting magnetic fields, major changes in temperature and pressure (though since they survive in stars, heat, pressure and gravity certainly aren't something they're particularly sensitive to) and detecting vibrations the rest of us would consider "sound" if the vibration wasn't passing through molten rock rather than air. Their indefinite lifespans mean travelling long distances in spaceships is no hardship to them, and they are born philosophers who can while away hundreds of years in relaxed and increasingly erudite debate, not even finishing the initial conversation until the discussion is settled to both side's satisfaction.

Earth gained the attention of one explorer as they cruised through the system in 2431. First for it's uniquely strong magnetic field for a rocky planet, and ultimately for its molten core - while on the low side of conditions favourable to The Divers, it is livable. Upon discovering this the explorer broadcast the information collected and then casually de-orbited his spaceship down onto the thinnest part of the Earth's crust he could find - the Marianas Trench. To say the nearby nations were shocked would be an understatement, but they simply thought an asteroid had hit. It wasn't until a few decades later when the explorer drilled down into the mantle and released a small eruption on his way into Earth's core that more investigation was done. The highly solipsistic city-states and nomadic ocean-goers were completely unenthused and rather alarmed to find the cause of several tsunamis, and earthquake and a now rapidly-cooling fresh tear in the sea floor was a single alien sightseer. Once contact was established, though, and a basic form of communication established, while it proved impossible to simply tell (or ask) the explorer to leave, it was enough to establish that both sides of the conversation were intelligent, and that more aliens were on their way thanks to his earlier broadcast - apparently from Alpha Centauri, which no telescopes on Earth had noticed being colonised as no one bothered to even build telescopes anymore.

60 years later and the aliens arrived to an Earth that was either unaware of their arrival - those not on the Atlantic Coast, who the isolated city-states had no interest in talking to - and others who simply didn't want them there. However, as communication was worked on, the aliens established their basic goal for the Earth - it's unique molten interior, almost unheard-of for a rocky planet Earth's size and age, was their only objective. They wanted both to study it and tour it. Essentially, Earth was set to become a major tourist destination of their far-flung communities, and all they wanted was to dive into Earth's core - and to fit in with the natives, they constructed an automated city-state on the ocean's surface, with a massive hollow shaft sunk down into the ocean floor to enable quick passage in and out of the mantle for them and their craft anchoring it. The city-states grumbled but ultimately couldn't do much. And once the aliens realised the cities needed metals and offered to share some of the molten metal they were able to easily bring from the mantle to the surface, trade was established and The Divers simply became another city-state of Earth, essentially operating a Mohorovic Mine in the Marianas Trench in exchange for uncontested rights to dive into the Earth and gawk at the core as alien tourists. The mine/city/spaceport has been operational for two years now, and Mal has big plans for what this development means for humanity - unlike the rest of the city-states that are now far too isolationist to consider the meaning of aliens, space travel or easy access to the Earth's core aside from cheap resources. The nomads, on the other hand, have come to feel a kinship with these long-lived, conversational and yet oddly unrooted people who exist in truly inhospitable conditions with no fixed landscape - much like the nomads themselves.

[6 of the 7 continents made with the help of the incredible "Q-BAM base map sea level rise 100m" by metallist-99 www.deviantart.com/metallist-9…

Description
A map of the world in the year 2500 CE, showing submerged areas and with an addition to show the continent of Antartica in more detail. Circled on the map in yellow is the arcology of Miami, sitting on carefully reclaimed land and practically the only city to remain in the unpredictable and dangerous Caribbean Gulf. Besides borders of the various city-states and the remaining freshwater sources, you can see the markings made to indicate available large-scale (i.e. several times the size of a developed country's national grid) power sources in each region, as noted in the map key.

The nations of the 21st century no longer exist by the 26th - though a multitude claiming to be descended from them do. However, the biggest mark of the passage of time is the simple affect of climate change.

By the end of the 21st century, vast tracts of land above and below the equator were regularly being scorched with temperatures exceeding 60˚C, from the Great Plains and California in the US to the vast bulk of central China, while severe weather events like hypercanes meant the Caribbean, Central America, Southeast Asia and the Southeastern US - not to mention most of South America - were completely uninhabitable. The governments of these now uninhabitable disaster zones were busy building massive structures to keep their cities liveable and safe from the conditions but failing miserably. The melting of glaciers dried out Asia, forcing China into decline alongside an India beset by destructive monsoons and soaring temperatures, while opening up new farmland in Patagonia. Greenland's icy wastes became instead solid rock and slushy mud, perfect for Denmark to heavily invest in by fertilising soil and planting crops across the formerly barren island. Europe held out with desalination plants and the Arab nations turned up the air-conditioning, while Russia and Canada began huge farming industries as the permafrost disappeared.

Meanwhile Australia and New Zealand both experienced a population boom and rapid industrialisation as refugees from Asia and India overwhelmed them, while Chile, Argentina and South Africa became the go-to destination for impoverished refugees on their respective continents. At first, the approach of these nations was to simply “keep the migrants out,” as they had done for many years, but by the second decade of the 2200s, the millions in refugee camps became a wasted resource as politicians suddenly realised they could use these desperate people as a low-cost workforce to drive their economies while looking good at the same time - which they needed to do, as their trade with both the US and China had now risen exponentially as those countries dried up and looked elsewhere for food. Simply put, they needed more labourers to increase food production, and they got them. For example, South Africa’s economy was invigorated by the crowds fleeing uninhabitable Madagascar and South-East Africa, and New Zealand was quickly converted to a series of huge mega-cities with intensive farming collectives in between. Australia suffered the affects of increased desertification, resulting in the countries coastline becoming a series of super cities while Tasmania remained a green oasis of intensive farming.

Very quickly this model of openness to refugees was copied by the USA, but in reverse - as the 2200s wore on, the US was a barren desert and only mining remained plausible, and Mexico was already gone, absorbed into the US in the 2080s by popular referendum to stave off inevitable collapse. The USA used the situation in the South Pacific to justify the takeover of Canada in a passive-aggressive move, following the millions of ex-Americans who had already fled there. Canada was quickly absorbed into the US with a whole lot of papers being signed that basically established a government-in-exile of the United Sates alongside the Canadian Parliament, which would jointly control the country. The fact America brought its nukes and military gear over the border as well sparked an ugly backlash of violence, mostly ex-patriate American-Canadians shooting at freshly-arrived Americans. It all calmed down eventually, but the US and Canada broke up shortly afterwards as countless groups declared independence and it eventually became simply too much hassle to shoot everyone instead of simply letting them go after signing a favourable trade deal - thankfully nobody was crazy enough to nuke the only farming land left on the continent to get their way. By the 2300s, North America was basically a huge farming conglomerate in Northern Canada of independent farming cities that traded with each other.

Russia had been more canny, taking in Asian and European refugees without fuss and parcelling out newly productive land as it appeared to the highest bidder. Ultimately, though, the influx of so many different political and social groups was too much for the social order to take, and a bloody civil war broke out. By 2270 the country had fallen into the same state as North America.

China poured its wealth and technical knowledge into keeping vast regions viable for farming and living even as sea levels rose, but as the majority of the population left and local industry tanked it became too little, too late - the Communist Party was never overthrown but simply ignored in the end after a severe twenty-year drought from 2210-2230, when the military and the people both decided to stop taking orders and just leave for the north in The Great Migration. Those left behind became fairly radical but basically stayed maintaining the newly revitalised areas, until the melting of Antartica took the sea levels too high for their ever-larger dams and flooded most of their hard-earned farmlands in 2340. Now it’s a bunch of different rulers and local groups holding sway over the remaining habitable areas. Not that this is a mark of failure - the same fate befell any country unlucky enough to be within 100m of 20th-century sea levels and open to the sea during The Great Melt of Antartica.

Speaking of Antartica, this was the most changed - already in 2100 West Antartica had been ice-free, but this process really got going in the 2200s. The Rush For Antartica was the last great colonial push by all the old powers, along with the newly formed governments - the Chileans and Argentinians had already built impressive industries and cities in West Antartica, and every other country wanted a piece of the pie. Huge engineering projects altered freshly-emerged coastlines, created rivers and lakes and built huge walls to keep back rapidly-rising waters, and large parts of the coastline remains to this day a morass of unpredictable built-up land that may or may not flood or wash away at the next high tide. Of course, by the end of 2200, most of the nations funding this and sending people were gone, and those living there found out the hard way freshly melted soil thousands of years old and rock do not make for good farmland. So a multitude of high-tech, gasoline powered cities arose as they turned to mining and drilling for oil instead.

The planet’s oil reserves finally gave out in 2335, by which time Antartica was self-sufficient and the rest of the world able to get by on the now more-reliable solar power. The fortunes of the Arab nations were now gone, but they’d been adjusting already over the previous century and a half as oil supplies had inevitably shrunk, and survived both as several strong city-states - Qatar being the most secure and advanced - and as nomadic tribes. Geothermal and wind energy also became the focus of several locations, creating new nations in these areas of self-contained cities. This trend spread globally as war was now just too expensive a risk and pointless - after the breakup of China, Russia, the US and Europe, pretty much every man and his dog had taken at least one nuke home from the piles of military hardware left lying around. The few nations that started fights got pulverised within minutes.

By this point, however, nations were not really a concept anyone used or were even familiar with anymore. With either scorching heat or polar nights to contend with, cities had become self-sufficient and borders unmanned because only fools or desperate people would go outside without using the highways, planes and train lines between each community - and if they crossed a border, they were generally welcomed as a new worker to help keep things running rather than a nuisance.

The nation state, multinational states and federated states had existed as concrete concepts for only a few centuries when the last of them simply faded away, replaced by a return to city-states and communal farming communities the world over, with the occasional local confederation for controlling a body of water or other valued resource (such as the African Confederation that allows its member city-states to work together in keeping the massive solar panels spread over the desert operating for them all, thus ensuring redundancy for damages caused by destructive sandstorms). As a result, borders became increasingly fuzzy - essentially being the area where one cities patrol drones and militias could reach and be confident of backup in case of trouble. Frequent border disputes were the result, but as time wore on it simply became a case of keeping armed when patrolling the further reaches of the land the city claimed, and simply hoping to outgun whoever caught you in “their” corner of the endless desert. When everything on land is bone dry, the only border that anyone is going to want to take or invade on is the coast. In the far north and south the farming cities and communities were more structured but again, didn’t really have the ability to patrol every patch of land 24/7.

This of course removed a large obstacle to the groups of people who had returned to (or in the case of the Roma, continued) a nomadic lifestyle. Besides those who roam the farmlands and chillier parts of the far north and south, frequently being attacked on suspicion of stealing crops, there are large quantities of desert dwellers that live in the supposedly inhabitable deserts of sand and baked dirt, and have formed countless rich and skilled cultures. And of course there are large numbers of sea nomads - communities that roam the colossal oceans and live in perfect harmony with the sea that has swallowed up so much.

Meanwhile the new city-states, especially closer to the equator, became ever more solipsistic and out of touch with nature - or what was left of it. Doming cities over with reflective mirrors and/or solar panels became common in the 2300s and soon full-blown arcologies had developed. Space exploration had already been brought to a halt by mounting financial fallout from climate change and resulting civil unrest back in the 2200s, but exploration of Earth for fresh resources and trade opportunities hadn’t - but as the 2200s ended and many countries that had invested in Antartica found no return on their investments, or collapsed under the strain of trying to build a new civilisation from scratch at the bottom of the world, turned people off the idea of investment or expansion. Ruling the world wasn’t worth it when it was either flooded or 60˚ in the shade. Increasingly, rather than growing larger or increasing connections with others, city-states fragmented again and again as different groups with different ideas set up their own city-states within their parent one.

Culture and ideas as a result are very different. Whereas today we see nation-states and monarchies, and a conflict between atheism and religious orthodoxy, in the twenty-sixth century this has changed to city-states and nomadic communities, with a conflict between personal philosophies of the city-dwellers and the naturalist spiritism or superstitions of the nomadic peoples. Organised religion is gone, but atheism is not really the focus of any great sentiment - rather, the solipsistic nature of living in arcologies has merged with the results of 21st-century idealism - specifically, the belief in every individual having inalienable rights and freedom of choice. In the 2200s this mainly manifested as civil unrest as people fought for their rights to be respected in the new places they settled, but from the 2300s onwards, the protests and uprisings stopped being about rights and instead on how people felt things should be run for “maximum efficiency” or “maximum quality of life” and so forth. These philosophies tend to be what we today would consider political arguments, and indeed can be formed into political parties. Advances and skills in engineering and recycling are the main focus of everyone for a brighter future, rather than IT or space exploration, and tend to be the centrepieces of the more controversial philosophies - most debates and research tends to be on the power of engineering to make any place liveable for humanity and the philosophical implications of different engineering approaches, echoing similar debates over evolution today.

However with social media any opinion on anything could amass a following and, in enough numbers, this lead either to the overthrow of previous governmental systems or the setting up of a new arcology - increasingly the strategy for victorious movements became simply to evict the losing movement’s members from the city and let them find their own way. This wasn’t really a setback though - centuries of social media had conditioned people to be incredibly sensitive to even the hint of someone thinking they might be wrong, so having a chance to build their own city and own personal Internet clean of such “intolerance” was often a gift to these ones. And of course that cycle continued repeating. As a result, the World Wide Web no longer exists at all - it had already been broken up during the 2200s and the collapse of governments able to maintain oceanic cables, but the personal philosophy trend was the nail in the coffin, and isolationist tendencies are rife in the city-states.

Naturalist spiritism or superstitions, on the other hand, tend to be widely shared between various nomadic communities as they cross paths. Depending on nature means developing a healthy respect and reverence for it, and in place of religious belief a number of colourful superstitions and rituals have arisen - nothing like organised religion, more like the tradition of “touch wood” or crossing fingers for luck, but with more steps and a bit more inner belief these things really make a difference. Their sense of community is far more hospitable than the isolationist city-dwellers, but infrequent due to limited contact with each other as communities remain split up over vast distances into small groups, to ensure enough food can be found for all in the inhospitable landscapes they roam.

Miami, marked by the yellow circle, is in the middle of the inhospitable Caribbean Gulf, but got lucky over the centuries with skilled engineering projects making it capable of withstanding back-to-back hypercanes without issue, much like Washington Island further north. It recently evicted a faction of city engineers that promoted a belief in nomadic lifestyles - they have since constructed a floating city-ship and roam calmer waters further out in the Atlantic. The winning faction was led by dark horse Mal Jy, a dark-haired and quiet man of middle age who single-handedly disabled the cities power grid in the midst of the other faction’s coup attempt, simply to prove his point - that a centralised system of engineering was too risky. He thus ended the coup and replaced the previous government with himself in one fell swoop, and has since converted the cities infrastructure so that every dwelling is a self-contained arcology by itself. He is no dictator - in fact after replacing the previous government, he specifically organised free and open elections to legally obtain executive power, before evicting the engineering faction. He is, instead, someone who believes in gathering information and acting on it for the greater good, regardless of other’s personal feelings. Which is why he had this map made, the first truly global map of Earth to be produced in two centuries. It will be used to inform his next moves as he seeks to guarantee Miami’s future in a changed world.

And the big red X in the middle of the Atlantic? That's the aliens. Contrary to all expectations, aliens didn't come to conquer or befriend humanity - rather, one just dropped in on an impulse one day - literally. That's because the alien race - known in human language as The Divers - are a race of magnetic fields. Borne in the heart of a gas giant in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy, they exist as complex patterns of magnetic fields in the super-dense core of their world, and the magnetised metals that generate them. As a result they tend to be a fairly stable society, living practically indefinitely unless some catastrophe disrupts the magnetic fields making them up, and the community coming together to stir a section of their environment into a magnetic frenzy that will produce a new individual - generally with a personality already set for it according to community consensus. They need turbulent and hot conditions to drive their bizarre electromagnetic biology, and a result their spaceships are generally made of tungsten and pressurised to ridiculous levels. They tend to colonise gas giants, brown dwarfs and stars rather than rocky, cold worlds that hold no interest for them and that they often cannot even perceive, as their vision is pretty much limited to detecting magnetic fields, major changes in temperature and pressure (though since they survive in stars, heat, pressure and gravity certainly aren't something they're particularly sensitive to) and detecting vibrations the rest of us would consider "sound" if the vibration wasn't passing through molten rock rather than air. Their indefinite lifespans mean travelling long distances in spaceships is no hardship to them, and they are born philosophers who can while away hundreds of years in relaxed and increasingly erudite debate, not even finishing the initial conversation until the discussion is settled to both side's satisfaction.

Earth gained the attention of one explorer as they cruised through the system in 2431. First for it's uniquely strong magnetic field for a rocky planet, and ultimately for its molten core - while on the low side of conditions favourable to The Divers, it is livable. Upon discovering this the explorer broadcast the information collected and then casually de-orbited his spaceship down onto the thinnest part of the Earth's crust he could find - the Marianas Trench. To say the nearby nations were shocked would be an understatement, but they simply thought an asteroid had hit. It wasn't until a few decades later when the explorer drilled down into the mantle and released a small eruption on his way into Earth's core that more investigation was done. The highly solipsistic city-states and nomadic ocean-goers were completely unenthused and rather alarmed to find the cause of several tsunamis, and earthquake and a now rapidly-cooling fresh tear in the sea floor was a single alien sightseer. Once contact was established, though, and a basic form of communication established, while it proved impossible to simply tell (or ask) the explorer to leave, it was enough to establish that both sides of the conversation were intelligent, and that more aliens were on their way thanks to his earlier broadcast - apparently from Alpha Centauri, which no telescopes on Earth had noticed being colonised as no one bothered to even build telescopes anymore.

60 years later and the aliens arrived to an Earth that was either unaware of their arrival - those not on the Atlantic Coast, who the isolated city-states had no interest in talking to - and others who simply didn't want them there. However, as communication was worked on, the aliens established their basic goal for the Earth - it's unique molten interior, almost unheard-of for a rocky planet Earth's size and age, was their only objective. They wanted both to study it and tour it. Essentially, Earth was set to become a major tourist destination of their far-flung communities, and all they wanted was to dive into Earth's core - and to fit in with the natives, they constructed an automated city-state on the ocean's surface, with a massive hollow shaft sunk down into the ocean floor to enable quick passage in and out of the mantle for them and their craft anchoring it. The city-states grumbled but ultimately couldn't do much. And once the aliens realised the cities needed metals and offered to share some of the molten metal they were able to easily bring from the mantle to the surface, trade was established and The Divers simply became another city-state of Earth, essentially operating a Mohorovic Mine in the Marianas Trench in exchange for uncontested rights to dive into the Earth and gawk at the core as alien tourists. The mine/city/spaceport has been operational for two years now, and Mal has big plans for what this development means for humanity - unlike the rest of the city-states that are now far too isolationist to consider the meaning of aliens, space travel or easy access to the Earth's core aside from cheap resources. The nomads, on the other hand, have come to feel a kinship with these long-lived, conversational and yet oddly unrooted people who exist in truly inhospitable conditions with no fixed landscape - much like the nomads themselves.

[6 of the 7 continents made with the help of the incredible "Q-BAM base map sea level rise 100m" by metallist-99 www.deviantart.com/metallist-9…